Infamous (50 page)

The three of them walked side by side down the Avenue of Flags, where a couple women had chained themselves to a pole, one wearing a stitched cloth that read PROTEST FASCIST TERROR. GERMAN CONSUL HERE. Men stood by and watched the broads like they were sideshow freaks, a couple of coppers standing by, waiting for a key or someone to cut the chain. About halfway down the wide avenue, Kathryn spotted two men, elbow to elbow with thousands of sweaty folks with sore feet, walking back into the fairgrounds, the crowd splitting around them, the two fellas talking and walking in a casual, relaxed way. One was a tall and skeletal thing, wearing a Western suit and boots, the other, in a white linen suit, was shorter, and thick around the middle, wearing Western boots and a pair of glasses.

She clutched George’s arm and pulled him into her, a loving couple after a fine old day at the Fair, resting her head on the mug’s shoulder, reaching down and gripping Geraline’s sweaty little hand. The girl looking up at Kathryn and narrowing her eyes with that goddamn “What gives?” that she’d gotten down pat.

One of the men tipped his cowboy hat to the fine family and kept on walking. George started to whistle “Stormy Weather” as they passed.

“George?”

“I sure am hungry.”

“Did you—”

“What?”

She pulled him in closer, following the fat, heavy crowd, bustling with souvenir hats and balloons and pinwheels for the kiddies, out onto South Michigan, walking damn-near a goddamn mile south to find the big open lot where they’d parked that road-tired Ford. Geraline crawled in the backseat and lay down without a word, tuckered out from the long day.

“I shoulda got a hot dog,” George said, knocking the car into gear and heading west over the river and back over to Cicero to dump the Ford. They’d get some sleep at the Astra, George said, pack and leave for Memphis in the morning.
Goddamn Memphis
. George excited about heading home, talking about places he wanted to show her.

“You really think we can make it to Cuba?” she asked.

“You can practically see the place from Key West,” George said. “We have a nice drive down the coast and then hop a boat.”

“I remember
Havana Widows
. Lots of nightclubs.”

“You bet. And rum.”

“Shoulda known you’d care for rum.”

“Joan Blondell sure was a knockout in that picture.”

“Why don’t you ring her up, then?” Kathryn said. “See if she’ll iron your shirts.”

The traffic thinned out over the river but nearly stopped when they got outside Cicero, streets closed off for this big, crazy NRA parade, with tons of folks carrying banners and American flags, pictures of Roosevelt on sticks. Lots of blue eagles and all that hooey.

“Think about all the people we’ve put to work,” George said, smiling, mashing the clutch, shifting to neutral, the engine chugging behind an endless line of cars. Window down, arm hanging out the window. “You bet ole Uncle Sam is in overdrive, paying those G-men to look for the Kellys.”

“Maybe you can get a blue eagle tattoo on your ass.”

“Maybe I will.”

George pulled into the alley beside Joe’s Square Deal Garage and killed the lights. Kathryn reached back and tried to shake Geraline awake, but the girl was exhausted, and they left her in the backseat, taking a side door and walking into the big open space where several boys were giving a big Hudson a once-over.

One of the men leaned back out from under the hood and smiled. Harvey Bailey wore a big shit-eating grin.

Verne Miller walked in from a back room, holding a Thompson loose in his right hand. Alvin Karpis. One of the Barker boys.
Shit. Shit. Shit.

“Hey, George,” Harvey said. “Think you got something that belongs to us.”

George looked to Kathryn, back to Harvey, and squared his shoulders.

“Guess you don’t have it on you right now,” Harvey said, grinning.

George shook his head. Kathryn was about to tell that bastard to go straight to hell when Harvey asked them if they’d be interested in a little business proposition.

Kathryn stepped in front of George and said, “Start talking, and make it fast.”

36

Friday, September 22, 1933

K
arpis drove the Hudson, the armored tank with the bulletproof glass, the steel-plated doors, and the revved-up eight-cylinder engine. Harvey and the boys piled into George’s dusty Ford since ole George wanted to lose the car anyway, Karpis telling Joe Bergl and some grease monkeys to switch out the smoke machine into its cab. When they snatched the dough, they’d leave the Ford on Jackson Street, pile into the Hudson, and be on their way. But, brother, Kathryn Kelly wasn’t having any of it, didn’t want her man involved in some two-bit snatch and grab, even after learning Fred Barker had a mean case of the shits. Harvey decided not to lecture her on the nature of the country’s fine Federal Reserve system, instead only telling her that there were banks and then there was
The Bank
. She shook her head, came back with some little kid rubbing fists in her eyes, telling Bergl to pull around their new machine or she’d go straight to Frank Nitti himself and tell him his word wasn’t worth chickenshit. She got her a Chevrolet sedan, clean papers and all that, but George wouldn’t go, telling her he needed to square this thing with Harvey and Verne and that they both could use the extra dough.

“You did the right thing,” Harvey had told them at a little past eleven, the lug down in the mouth after Kathryn slapped him across the jaw and told him he was a fool.

“Say, is that my gun?”

Miller looked down at the Thompson and nodded. “Collateral,” he said.

“Keep it,” Kelly said, following Harvey and Verne and Dock Barker into the Ford. “That gun’s nothing but trouble. I don’t want to be ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly anymore.”

“Who are you, then?” Harvey asked.

“Just George.”

They crossed the river at eleven-thirty and had found their spot on Jackson where it met Clark Street, where the mail carriers and the reserve guards would be rounding the corner at midnight with those gorgeous fat sacks of money fresh off the train in from the U.S. Mint.

Harvey checked his watch. No one in the Ford spoke. George sat at the wheel, chewing some gum and watching the sidewalk.

All the men carried machine guns except for George. George refused to take anything more than a shotgun, a .38 for his hip pocket, and some extra shells. Beads of sweat had popped out on his forehead while he loaded the pistol and looked over the git with Karpis and made a deal with Harvey that ten grand would be shaved off his take, whatever the take may be.

“Then we’re square,” Kelly had said.

“And then we’re square,” Harvey said, offering his hand.

They would all split the city after the job, Harvey getting word to his wife through a friend of Harry Sawyer’s that he’d be coming for her and his boy tomorrow and to bring only one suitcase. They’d drive west till he saw a good place to cross the border into Canada, like he’d done a thousand times in the old days. They’d become new people. Start over. Start living, and leave this crummy country on its own. Karpis was right. He’d go fishing. He’d drink some beer. He’d farm a little.

George kept the Ford’s engine running with no lights. A few minutes later, he flicked his lights into Karpis’s rearview mirror.

Harvey turned to see four men rounding the corner, two pushing the mail cart and the two guards walking along, jawing and loosely holding a couple shotguns. The four men in the Ford fixed bandannas across their faces and waited till the guards reached that halfway spot between Clark and LaSalle. George pulled out on Jackson—a loose, lazy flow of traffic at midnight—and smoothly edged up to the curb, all the gunmen piling out with guns drawn.

From the backseat, Harvey punched the button, and dense black smoke began to pour from the cab of the Ford, inking out Jackson Street. The guards already had their hands up, and shotguns clattered to the sidewalk, scooped up by George and Barker, Miller telling them all something hot and clear, making them turn and face the walls of the Continental Illinois National Bank. The men hoisted fat canvas bags, throwing the loot into the Hudson, slamming the trunk, with Karpis back behind the wheel.

The whole thing not lasting thirty seconds, the doors not even slamming closed before Karpis was driving through the thick smoke, breaking clear on the other side and running west on Jackson, the men laughing and talking, pulling the bandannas off their faces.

Harvey sat up front and lit a cigarette.

“What’d I tellya,” Karpis said. “What’d I tellya?”

He drove fast up to Adam and then west across the Chicago River, back toward Cicero, to divide up the loot and find each of their new cars, serviced and fueled up.

“The smoke was a nice touch,” Harvey said, relaxing a bit, leaning back into his seat. Karpis drove at a nice clip, not fast, but not so slow as to be noticed. “What kinda bank has two guards for all that dough?”

Karpis hit a little bump in the road, the tail of the Hudson scraping the pavement, just as they were set to cross Halstead, a green light speeding them on to Joe’s Square Deal Garage. That’s when that damn little Essex coupe came out of damn-near nowhere, honking its horn and T-boning their Hudson right toward a streetlamp. Karpis tried to right the car, but it kept going straight for the light, scattering two beat cops right before the car crashed.

Everything was still for a few seconds. Cracked glass and busted machine parts in the road. Harvey felt like his heart had stopped but now could feel it jackhammering in his chest.

And then Harvey heard the women scream from the Essex, and that was everything.

“I WANT TO SEE MR. NITTI,” KATHRYN SAID.

“Mr. Nitti ain’t here.”

“You tell that wop son of a bitch that I know where he can find Verne Miller and Harvey Bailey.”

The fella shrugged his shoulders and walked away.

“Who’s that?” Geraline asked.

“Some stooge.”

“Thought we’re leaving.”

“Let me tell you something, sister,” Kathryn said. “Don’t ever let a man tell you the rules. Set ’em yourself.”

Geraline nodded. She was smoking and drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer at the Pabst Blue Ribbon Casino, which stayed open after most of the lights along the Fair Midway had dimmed. Kathryn fished for another cigarette and tapped the end of her silver cigarette case on the edge of the table. Those bastards had no right to force George on a job at midnight, right while the heat was all over them, Gus T. Jones and the G-men crawling all over the city. They shoulda done him a solid and let ’im skate.

“I like your hat,” Geraline said.

It was a fine little beret she’d bought along the Streets of Paris, sold to her by some gal who walked those streets with a mirror on her back. Kathryn reached up on her head and tossed the beret to the little girl. “Take it.”

“You’re all right, Kit,” the girl said, trying on the hat, a Lucky hanging from the corner of her mouth.

“You gotta go back.”

“I don’t wanna go back.”

“Your parents are sick with worry.”

The girl shrugged. “They don’t care a rat’s ass about me. My daddy always said I was nothing but another mouth to feed, and he’d be good and goddamn glad when I could look out for myself. And so here I am.”

“You can’t go with us.”

“I can carry your bags,” the girl said, taking a sip of beer. “Your guns. I can run errands. Get your clothes pressed, shine your shoes.”

“Don’t do that,” Kathryn said. “Don’t ever play the stooge.”

The fella walked back into the casino bar and leaned down to Kathryn and whispered in her ear. She tossed a dollar on the table and followed, walking down the empty streets of the Fair, the neon and bright lights all gone, leaving nothing but the barren, weird shapes of the exhibits.

“What’ll they do with all this stuff after the Fair?” Geraline asked.

“Tear it down.”

“They built this just to tear it all apart?” she asked, mouth hanging open. “What a waste.”

“The American way, sister.”

The fella led them up the steps, twenty-seven of them, Kathryn knowing because Geraline was counting under her breath, up to the House of Tomorrow, an octagon-shaped building with a garage occupied by a little airplane, making it seem clear that every family would be zipping around the skies in the future. The house walls were made of plate glass.

He left them on the top of the house, rails wrapping the sides, where she soon saw a big black Cadillac pull down the drive and kill the lights.

“Who’s Frank Nitti?”

“The kind of guy that doesn’t have any boss.”

“George doesn’t have a boss.”

Kathryn smiled and squashed a cigarette under her toe.

Nitti bounded up the steps, a crisp wind cutting off Lake Michigan, Geraline nearly losing the beret. Nitti was short and swarthy, with a fat mustache, slick hair, and a hundred-dollar pin-striped suit.